One recent morning, I was sitting with my son in the dining room, peeling a banana for him as he looked at me grinning his five-toothed grin. We have been struggling with baby-led weaning, as he seemingly rejects any solids that are actually food (though he’ll gladly chew zippers, cardboard, and the dining room chair leg). “Maybe we should try the foods that his sister liked at this age,” I thought to myself. And then paused. At that moment, I could barely remember a single thing we had fed my daughter at nine months.
Why couldn’t I remember how my daughter (now age 3) had liked her bananas at this age? I did a quick memory scan and drew yet another blank. How had she eaten bananas as a baby? Sliced? Pureed? Gripped in her sticky little hand like my son? I had a hazy memory of something to do with yogurt and maybe some Cheerios, but other than that I was staring into a void of emptiness when it came to the elaborate culinary creations I seem to think I prepared for her.
I drifted into a benign motherly spiral. It was part shame for forgetting something I was certain was important to the story of my children’s childhood, and part frustration that as a mother I couldn’t remember something so seemingly simple as what food I had fed my first baby. As I surfaced (and handed my son his banana, which he promptly and without ceremony, threw on the floor), I realized that what upset me the most wasn’t necessarily what I had forgotten in that particular instance (who cares about the banana), but that I was forgetting things at all that I thought I should remember, and what I knew had been some of my happiest times—sharing family meals—as a mother to boot.
Forgetting Happy Memories and What To Do About It
Forgetfulness and lapses of memory are not unique to parents and can be so mundane yet remarkable that they even make the news. As a recent example, various outlets have reported on the phenomenon of “post-concert amnesia” being experienced by Taylor Swift fans of all ages after attending the Eras Tour—a quirk of memory affecting some of Swifties’ most joyous reflections.
As an “elder Swiftie” who was lucky enough to see her perform at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey, I was disconcerted driving home from the concert. The evening was a blur from the moment we entered the stadium gates, even though my ears were still ringing with refrains from Midnights, and I could still remember the warmth on my cheeks when flames lit the stadium during “Bad Blood.”
How memory works
Robert N. Kraft, Ph.D., a professor of cognitive psychology at Otterbein University, recently discussed this phenomenon in an article for Time Magazine. He says we often expect too much of our memory, and it’s not fair to expect to remember minute details of every experience, even our happiest ones.
“We generally remember general impressions and a few distinctive moments for any kind of event, and that’s usually accurate enough for our purposes,” he says. “We get an overall impression and then we retain some selective images.”
Discussing how this applies in particular to some of our happiest moments in life like wedding days, pregnancies, the birth of our children, and their first steps, Kraft notes that it’s quite normal for our memories to feel like snapshots from these days.
“Just because you’re excited throughout does not mean you’ll remember that, that’s not how memory works,” he says. Instead, your brain “looks for events that deviate from the baseline.”
Forgetting is misunderstood
Kraft highlights that we also often misunderstand forgetting, especially those of us who tend to see losing memories as a fault instead of the gift it can result in: that of living in the moment fully. He recounted an anecdote about a young man who had a picture-perfect memory. Every morning he would wake up and tell the complete and perfectly detailed story of what had happened the day before… only to find it took him 24 hours to recount his entire day.
We often misunderstand forgetting, especially those of us who tend to see losing memories as a fault instead of the gift it can result in: that of living in the moment fully.
“Forgetting is its own system,” Kraft, who has written in praise of forgetting for all that it allows us to accomplish in our lives, says. “It allows us to experience the world more fully, unencumbered by memory. It allows us to take in things in an immediate way and to really live life fully. And to later condemn ourselves for living in the moment and for the natural selectivity of memory I think is unfair to us.”
Source: Élevae
The best way to safeguard memories
While Kraft encourages us to look at our forgetting in a more benevolent light, he also knows from personal experience that forgetting something personally meaningful can be upsetting. Luckily, for those truly special moments (even the mundane daily events you may find meaningful), there are tactics we can employ to help us remember our happiest days for many years to come.
Journal
As a photographer and a devoted documenter of every special event for my family, I was certain that Kraft would suggest taking more pictures or even a video if we truly want to remember something in detail. However, his top suggestion for parents who hope to capture family memories is to journal about them.
“I strongly advocate for keeping a pregnancy and early parenthood journal,” he says. “It’s more effective than photos in some ways because when you’re writing, you’re rehearsing [the event], you’re thinking about it and then you’re reviewing the journal.”
As we journal, Kraft notes that we’re not only recording these memories, but creating a narrative from them and our unique perspective, full of details that only we may have noticed.
“You’re working these events into narrative memory which is what we use most of the time—the story of your life and your child’s life and it allows you to remember what you thought were the first steps or the first words. And when you go back to the journal you’ll not only remember the event, but you’ll also remember writing in the journal about it.”
Kraft says that he loves photographs, and knows how meaningful certain family snapshots can become over the years. However, when snapping dozens (or hundreds) of photos, the image of course comes from the camera. We generate memories ourselves and recording them with our own hands in a journal has the potential to hold even more meaning for us down the line.
Talk to other people who were there
Another strategy for better committing events or experiences to memory more fully is talking to someone else who was also there and shared the experience.
Different people experiencing the same event will come away with different, but possibly overlapping memories. Each person will prioritize and highlight different details, and comparing your experiences and recollections may even help you unlock memories of your own.
Of course, it’s possible too that someone will remember an event completely differently, but that can be part of the fun as you revisit your past and create a new, collective narrative memory from the collaborative effort with loved ones.
Don’t discount sensory memory
Kraft notes that for some memories, revisiting the place you first experienced them (the farmers market where your partner proposed, the field where you said your wedding vows, the park where your child took their first steps) or even smelling an aroma you might associate with a memory (the smell of pancakes that your partner made for you on your first Mother’s Day) could bring back details you thought were lost.
In an essay he wrote about lost memories, Kraft says we can be as precise or even generic as we might like in these efforts: “Did you live near a bakery as a child? Go visit a bakery—any bakery—and see if the smells trigger memories. Replay an old song. Visit a playground and go down a slide, reliving the old sensations. See what perceptual experiences come back, and follow their leads.”
Source: @luckyandi
Give yourself grace, the world has changed
Kraft says that a large part of the guilt people may feel at not remembering comes not from a fault with our memories, but from a fundamental shift in our society in recent years. He says our memory capabilities may feel inadequate in the present day partly because the sheer volume of information accessible to us is overwhelming.
For example, returning to the concert analogy, 20 years ago we may have compared notes about the event with the five friends we went with—not 10,000 other concert-goers who now post dozens of videos and reflections to TikTok.
The prevalence of social media can lead us to feel pressure to document and memorialize special moments, especially when it comes to emotion-laden roles like parenting. We may feel compelled to not only act like the perfect parent with the perfect children but also to document and memorialize every moment (all while living in the moment too!).
The prevalence of social media can lead us to feel pressure to document and memorialize special moments, especially when it comes to emotion-laden roles like parenting.
“This intense pressure to be everything—not just the nurturer in the moment, but also to be the recorder, doesn’t change the nature of memory,” he says. “We still have the same memory systems we had 12,000 years ago, and today’s pressures aren’t going to improve those.”
“It’s not a moral or personal or motherly failing [to forget things],” Kraft adds, as I admitted feeling guilty for the number of milestones and little moments I couldn’t remember as clearly as I wished.
“We don’t thank our memory enough, and we don’t thank our forgetting enough,” he reflected. “We don’t celebrate every time we remember something—somebody’s name or what we should get at the grocery store—we just take it in stride. It’s only when we forget that we condemn.”
“What other aspects of that child’s experience from when she was 1 year or 2 years old do you remember?” he asked.
I paused and quickly remembered how the weight of her little body had felt against mine, those afternoons when she would only nap in my arms. Memories came back of her sitting in the living room, staring, transfixed as the breeze caught the gauzy curtains in the summer sunlight. I remembered her little fingers exploring Christmas lights, and the evenings I spent drying her hair after her bath, wrapping each of her baby curls around my fingers in turn.
“You’re doing well,” Kraft says. “Because you remember those.”
